“Sure-thing gamblers; con-men—it’s a regular crook’s paradise.... And there’s that fellow, Rook....”
The eyes of the man in the black Stetson narrowed abruptly at the corners; for a moment, as a curtain is drawn swiftly from right to left, something arose to peer out of those eyes, glowing, deep-down, like a still, festering flame. But it was gone upon the instant—
“... And there’s that fellow, Rook....” the man had said.
Of a sudden he had stopped short as if he had been muzzled; presently his voice had come again, dry, matter-of-fact:
“I’ll see that raise, Carpenter, and it’ll cost you just twenty iron men to call....”
Plainly, that name, “Rook,” had been taboo; the speaker had been silently reminded of it.
The man in the black Stetson—he had been known as Black Steve Annister in the back blocks at Wooloomooloof before he had made of that name a by-word in the honkatonks and the gambling-hells from San Francisco northward to the Wind River country, and beyond it—Black Steve Annister was sitting upright now, but he had retired behind a wide-spread copy of the Durango County Gazette. He was not reading it, however, although he was looking through it—at the three men just across the aisle, studying them through the pin-pricks he had made in it, himself unseen.
Annister had arrived in New York only the week previous from Sourabaya, Java, and he had not waited even overnight before he had begun the long journey, broken at Washington for half a day, which had taken him now half way southwestward across the State of Texas. Presently the long train would cross the Pecos, beyond it the serrated ramparts of the Guadalupes; Dry Bone was just between.
Annister, studying the men, frowned abruptly, yawning behind his hand. Two of the men he put down for ranchers—sheep men, probably; there was about them none of the glamor of that West which lingers even now in the person of a cattleman; and these men were negligible.
But the third man would have been noticeable anywhere. He was a bull’s bulk of a man, hard-featured, mouth a straight gash above a heavy chin barbered to the blood; the observer across the aisle would have said “cowman,” and registered a bull’s eye with it, point-blank.